It’s been about five years since Kin and I founded our company, Tech Gypsies. We chose the name because, at the time, we were living entirely on the road. We needed an umbrella for both our websites – Hack Education and API Evangelist – and for the technical work and writing we undertook together.

In 2016, we started a podcast. It wasn’t our first joint project. We’d done some speaking and teaching together. But we’d never really promoted ourselves under the “Tech Gypsies” label before. We needed a logo, we figured, so we turned to Bryan Mathers, who’d created such a fabulous set of imagery for Hack Education.

The process of working with Bryan – what he calls “visual thinkery” – helped us hone the message we wanted to send about our work. We wanted something that underscored our position as outsiders, our attention to history (particularly to forgotten or underground history), and our emphasis on storytelling.

I’ve been uncomfortable with the word “gypsy” all along, although I think it’s desirable to try to reclaim it from being a racist epithet, that’s much easier said than done. Neither Kin nor I are Roma.

So we’re really rebranding. New logos and a new name.

We’ve chosen to become the Contrafabulists.

Fabulists are fable-spinners and myth-makers. Kin and I are storytellers ourselves, but we hope to poke holes in the hype and distortion associated with new digital technologies. Contrafabulists are, as the name would suggest, against lying.

(I briefly suggested to Kin we go with “Antifabulist” which could have the wonderful abbreviation “antifa.” Consider that part of the message regardless.)

If you’re subscribed to our podcast through iTunes or Stitcher, the feed should continue uninterrupted. If you subscribe via RSS to the old websites, the new feeds are:

Blog: contrafabulists.com/feed.xml

Podcast: podcast.contrafabulists.com/feed.xml

Podcast Show Notes: podcast.contrafabulists.com/blog.xml

You can also sign up to receive the new Contrafabulist newsletter, that will include a link to the podcast, to the show notes, and other related stories.

Thanks! (And look for Contrafabulists stickers and merchandising – coming soon.)